Here’s the prompt I have to FredTheHeretic, which is the opening of this article:
I want you to make a poem out of the following vignette:
Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey early in the Fall. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the final performance of the competition.
Some hip hop comes up on the sound system and a few of the dancers begin moving to the music. Some of them are standing up from their positions in the audience and are dancing in place. A couple others, at the far-left and far-right down front, are dancing in the outside aisles. More start joining in.
Down front, in the center, the action photographer—the guy who’s there to shoot photos of each dance number so they can then be sold to parents—is sitting down front on his high swivel chair. He’s smiling, swiveling in the chair to survey the scene, and he starts clapping on the back-beat.
That’s me.
Now another hip-hop number comes up and, in a whooshhh! dancers get up out of their seats, rush to the aisles, and the aisles are jammed with kids joyously dancing. Five, six, eight, eleven, fifteen years old, a few older. Even the dancers waiting in the wings on stage for the final number, they danced too.
All dancing. 100, 200, maybe more. Dancing.
It was wonderful.
It took at little work, some back and forth, but here’s the poem as it currently stands.
The Dance Before the Curtain
The auditorium hummed with waiting,
Mothers in rows, their eyes half-lidded with two days’ watching.
The smell of wood varnish, faint sweat, and faint hope,
Young girls sat scattered, like autumn leaves on linoleum.
Then a bass line throbbed.
From the corners of the space, tentative feet began to tap.
An older girl, sneakers glittering like city lights, rose in the aisle, spinning;
Another, four years old, clutched her ribbon and swayed.
It spread like sunlight through blinds, sudden and warm,
As aisles filled with the unchoreographed joy of motion.
Five, ten, twenty—a tide of movement
Rushed from rows and wings.
Down front, the photographer smiled,
His swivel chair a merry-go-round of swivels and claps,
His lens hung idle.
Here was the shot:
Not on stage, but in the spontaneous throng
Of hip-hop beats meeting young hearts and eager limbs.
What rose there was not polished or planned,
But wonderful as dandelions scattering
On the wind of speakers too loud for the room.
A brief, chaotic hymn to the human body,
Unjudged, untamed, alive.
And then,
The music cut.
A collective sigh settled like dust,
As dancers returned to their seats.
But something lingered,
A small, shared pulse.
The judges stepped forward, their expressions unreadable.
They spoke softly, and the words carried a weight that lingered.
Ribbons were given, not for effort alone, but for something unspoken,
A recognition of motion, of courage shaped into form.
There was no flourish, no applause demanded—
Just a quiet moment, an acknowledgment, and then the lights rose.
